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Power outage in the winter?

We close off the doors to the rest of the house and fire up the fireplace (and keep plenty of logs available).
 
Yup, that's it. Although that one appears to have been updated with some sort of electric control (perhaps just a microvolt system that still doesn't require outside power). My great aunt's furnace had a control mounted on the wall upstairs and chains that ran from it to the air control on the front of the firebox. I got in trouble more than once for playing with it!
 
Because we get outages in the summer due to storms and also in the winter due to ice build up on the trees (broken branches over wires) I had this installed, which is hooked up to our 1000 gallon propane tank. Fully automatic, were never out of power. Once a week it runs on it's own for about ten minutes checking the circuits and shuts down. Love it! PJ
View attachment 51885
 
Our Irma battery charging setup. We have a generator but not an automatic one. Have to wheel it outside and plug it in.

David
Charging station Irma 2017.jpg
 
"I grew up in a house that had one large heater grate between the living room and kitchen, it was a one story house so the doors were left open during the day, at night we had a ton of quilts to sleep under. We had hot water only in the winter as a manifold from the water heater was inside the furnace. Water was heated in the summer for a bath, on top of the kitchen stove. For air conditioning, all the windows and doors were open during the day. I surly don't complain about the luxuries we have today. Wouldn't it be nice if some of the kids today had to live like we did years ago, just for a short time mind you. And in 1948 we got a 6 inch TV in a 4 foot wide cabinet! We were stepping in high cotton then, moving in with the rich folks! :highly_amused:"

Paul, that perfectly describes my house, when I moved in twelve years ago the only heat was a floor furnace in between the living room and the hall to the kitchen and one small wall furnace in the laundry room. I replace the floor furnace with a gas fireplace and ran a gas line from the laundry room to my sons' room to hook up a wall furnace in there. Since half of my windows were painted shut I put some window units in the house to provide A/C.
 
Other than two gas fired furnaces with electric blowers, our house is total electric, two AC systems, electric kitchen plus other plug in stuff and after a week without power once, I decided to have the generator system installed and glad I did. Two summers ago it ran for 5 days 24/7 and never failed to give us all the power we needed. Not for everyone I know, but if you have a portable, make sure it's well ventilated when running! It's a tragedy how some folks have died from trapped exhaust fumes getting into the house. PJ
 
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